GRID · REFINERIES
Where Crude Becomes Fuel
Crude oil straight from the ground is almost useless — a thick, dark soup of thousands of different hydrocarbons. A refinery is the giant chemical plant that turns it into the fuels we actually burn: petrol, diesel, jet fuel, heating oil, and the feedstocks for plastics. It does this mostly by fractional distillation— heating the crude until it boils and catching each fraction as it condenses at a different height up a tall tower, the lightest gases at the top and the heaviest tars at the bottom. This layer maps 728 refineriesworldwide as those distillation towers: the midpoint of the hydrocarbon chain, sitting between the wells and crude pipelines that feed them and the products pipelines that carry the finished fuel away. Unlike the map’s other OpenStreetMap layers, this one is genuinely global — the biggest clusters fall on the real refining powers. OSM carries no refining-capacity figure, so — as with the pipelines and LNG layers — the towers are not sized; one colour just marks a refinery. Tap a tower for its name and country.
The refining powers
This is the honest payoff of the layer: where most other OpenStreetMap layers lean heavily to the US and Europe because that’s where mapping is densest, refineries cluster on the countries that actuallyrefine the most oil. The United States leads on count; then come the giants of South Asia, the former Soviet bloc, the Gulf, and East Asia. (This counts refineries, not barrels per day — one vast complex like Jamnagar in India or Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia outweighs many smaller plants.)
Mapped the world over
Refineries are big, permanent, landmark facilities, so OpenStreetMap maps them fairly completely everywhere — which is why this layer doesn’t carry the Europe/US skew of the pipeline and transmission layers. Every inhabited region is well represented. One honest gap: a handful of the very largest refineries are tagged in OSM without a clear refinery name (Baytown in Texas, Yanbu and Ruwais on the Arabian Peninsula, among others), so a few giants may be missing even though their countries are well covered.
About this data
Every refinery comes from OpenStreetMap (the industrial=refinery tag, ODbL). Because some large refineries are mapped under looser tags, we added a careful rescue: features tagged industrial=oil or man_made=worksare admitted only when they carry a refinery-like name — the bare industrial=oiltag on its own is a swamp of ~129,000 unrelated things (filling stations, oil depots, auto shops, offshore platforms), so it is never trusted blind; a handful of non-oil strays that slipped through were filtered back out. Country is assigned by testing each refinery’s coordinates against Natural Earth’s national borders. There is no refining-capacity figurein OpenStreetMap for refineries, so — exactly as with the pipelines and LNG layers — this map does not invent a size hierarchy: every tower is drawn the same size and a single warm colour just marks “a refinery here.” Operators are never shown (the no-recon rule). The set is genuinely global, but a few of the very largest plants that OSM tags without a refinery name may be absent. Snapshot taken 2026-06-26.